The Dublin King: The True Story of Edward Earl of Warwick, Lambert Simnel and the 'Princes in the Tower'

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

I should like to give my profuse thanks to those people in Ireland who, in various ways have helped me with my research. These include James Harte, Samm Coade and the other very kind staff of the enormously helpful Irish National Library, together with Professor McGing and Eileen Kelly of Trinity College, Dublin, and Kate Manning, of the Archives of University College, Dublin. I should also like to record a heartfelt posthumous thank you to Professor F.X. Martin, whose publication on Lambert Simnel first brought to my attention the existence of the surviving (albeit damaged) seal of the Dublin King.

I also have debts of gratitude in the U.K. I am enormously grateful to Dr Emily Kearns, who has very kindly checked my Latin (and Greek) translations in an attempt to ensure that no mistakes have crept in. My thanks are also due to the Essex Library service; to the staff of the Albert Sloman Library of the University of Essex; to Marie Barnfield, of the Richard III Society Non-fiction Papers Library; to the Staff of the Guildhall Library in London; and to Dave Perry, who helped me check through the Great Chronicle of London. Dave Perry and Annette Carson also checked the proofs of my text to remove typographical and other errors and ensure that my meaning was clear. Finally, my thanks also go to the living Essex ‘Lambert Simnel’ who figures on Facebook, and who responded to my enquiry – even though, sadly, his Facebook identity proved to be a pseudonym!

Introduction

Anyone seeking information about Lambert Simnel will easily discover that this rather unusual name refers to a late fifteenth-century pretender to the English throne. His career is seen as marking one of the final chapters of the so-called Wars of the Roses. The word pretender was originally a neutral term, merely meaning claimant. Thus, for example, the eighteenth-century Old Pretender and Young Pretender, though they made the unspeakable error of professing the wrong religion in terms of the England (and Britain) of their day, were certainly not in any sense false claimants to the throne. However, since the word pretender tends to be applied mainly to failures, it is now often seen as implying ‘fake claimant’, and this is definitely its generally perceived meaning in the case of Lambert Simnel. To most historians – and to most of the general public – Simnel was nothing more than an impostor.

The name relates to a boy put forward by Yorkist leaders as the figurehead for their first campaign against Henry VII, a year or two after the latter’s usurpation of the English throne in 1485. Incidentally, the word ‘usurpation’ is another term which might benefit from some analysis. Properly, it means taking something over without a legal right. Yet although it has frequently been applied to the accession of Richard III (who, in reality, was offered the throne of England by the Three Estates of the Realm), curiously it is not generally applied to the violent seizures of power by Edward IV and Henry VII. Apparently in the case of a violent but successful seizure of power, the use of the term usurpation is not now seen as appropriate!

If the general perception of ‘Lambert Simnel, the impostor’ is correct, the story of his 1487 adventure would be the first (and perhaps the only) incident in English history which involved a serious attempt at putting a totally fake claimant on the throne.1 If that is the case, then it certainly needs some explanation. It has therefore been suggested that, thanks to Richard III’s alleged murder of his nephews, the ‘princes in the Tower’, followed by the natural death of Richard’s son, there was no clear and genuine Yorkist claimant to the throne to head the new campaign against Henry VII. Thus the only solution for the defeated and ousted Yorkists was to train a young impostor for the role of their figurehead leader. This impostor was then crowned as king in a unique ceremony held in the building generally known today as Christ Church Cathedral Dublin. However, the boy’s real name was then revealed to be Lambert Simnel by Henry VII’s spokesmen – or by some of them – for in actual fact even the official Tudor sources offer conflicting information regarding the pretender’s true identity.2

Since his alleged name of Lambert Simnel sounds somewhat improbable – and has, in fact, sometimes been described as having a pantomime-like quality – it has also been suggested by some historians that the boy might perhaps have had a non-English (possibly Flemish) ancestry. However, no proof has ever been produced to show that the surname Simnel originated in the Low Countries. In fact, the true evidence relating to the history of this surname will be revealed in Chapter 6.

In addition to positing a misleading modern invention in respect of the origins of the name ‘Lambert Simnel’, the widespread current standard interpretation of his story also often includes misleading statements relating to the lives and deaths of the so-called princes in the Tower. Actually, there is no real evidence that those two sons of Edward IV were murdered. Although it has been widely credited, the very detailed but unsubstantiated account of their slaughter written by Sir Thomas More dates from thirty years after the alleged event. In fact Thomas More himself was an insignificant boy of five in 1483, when the drama which he later reported in such detail was alleged to have occurred.

As for the contemporary fifteenth-century sources on the fate of the ‘princes’, they are conflicting, and very much lacking in detail. However, as we shall see, according to one near-contemporary source, the 1487 pretender was himself supposed to have claimed to be the younger of the two.3 It is true that, when we examine it carefully, the evidence on this point in relation to Lambert Simnel will prove to be somewhat questionable. Nevertheless, there is no doubt whatever that a subsequent Yorkist pretender, known to history as Perkin Warbeck, advanced a similar claim on his own account, and was quite widely believed. Thus the Warbeck case proves incontrovertibly that the death of the sons of Edward IV was by no means universally accepted as a fact in the late 1480s and the 1490s. Indeed, Sir Thomas More himself later acknowledged that belief in the survival of at least one of them still persisted in his day.

The legal situation in respect of the so-called ‘princes’ was somewhat complex. An unofficial Parliament (meeting of the Three Estates of the Realm) in 1483, followed subsequently by the official Parliament of 1484, formally declared these two boys and their sisters illegitimate and unable to claim anything by inheritance. Thus from the summer of 1483 until the summer of 1485 (i.e. during the reign of Richard III) neither of Edward IV’s sons was a genuine, legal prince – in consequence of which, neither of them possessed any claim to the English crown. This legal decision was significant in several ways, as we shall see later. However, one important side effect was that Richard III – who had been recognised as the legitimate sovereign by the same piece of legislation – would have had absolutely no logical reason for killing these two sons of his elder brother in order to obtain the throne, since they had already officially been declared bastards and excluded from the line of succession.

Subsequently, however, that legislation was revoked by the first Parliament of Henry VII. The new king’s purpose in having the Act of Parliament of 1484 rescinded was to enable himself to present Elizabeth of York – the elder sister of the ‘princes’ – as the Yorkist heiress to the throne – and then marry her himself. However, one unfortunate but inevitable side effect of Henry’s repeal was that it also restored the rights to the throne of his bride’s brothers. Thus, if either of them was alive in 1486–87, as the now-reinstated legitimate son of a former king, that boy’s claim to sovereignty would once again have been a strong one – far superior to the virtually non-existent blood claim of Henry VII himself. A surviving son of Edward IV (if there was one) would therefore arguably have been in a strong legal position to reassert a claim to represent the house of York.

One consequence of this is that after 1485 Henry VII’s motivation for ending the lives of his brothers-in-law (the elder of whom would by then have been aged at least 15 and able to reign in his own right) would have been very strong. Indeed, it would have been far more compelling than Richard III’s earlier motivation to do away with a pair of minor children who were legally excluded from the succession. The most significant proof of this statement lies in the fact that Henry VII did indeed put to death Perkin Warbeck, who had advanced a powerful (and, to some people, convincing) claim to be the younger of the two ‘princes’.

However, the second point regarding the Yorkist claim in 1486–87 is that, even if both of Edward IV’s sons by Elizabeth Woodville were dead, there were numerous other Yorkist claimants to the throne in existence. These comprised various nephews of Richard III and Edward IV. At least one of these Yorkist royal nephews – John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln – was both adult and at liberty. Moreover, he had been promoted to high rank and groomed for government service during the reign of Richard III. Indeed, in terms of the norms of inheritance, he was probably the strongest Yorkist contender for the throne, because, unlike his cousins – the sons of Edward IV, and of the attainted Duke of Clarence – Lincoln’s claim had never been impugned by any parliamentary legislation. If the Yorkists were in search of a leader and a claimant to the throne, Lincoln, the eldest surviving Yorkist prince, would have been an obvious candidate.

But, strangely, instead of putting forward his own claim, the 25-year-old Lincoln chose instead to back the supposed impostor. Why on earth would a genuine – and adult – Yorkist prince such as Lincoln have chosen to back a false claimant who (according to the surviving contemporary accounts) was a minor, instead of advancing his own valid claim? This unanswered question is by no means new, for it reportedly preoccupied Henry VII himself, in 1487.4 Henry is said to have expressed regret at the death of Lincoln at the Battle of Stoke, since that precluded any possibility of interrogating the earl on this very subject. For about five hundred years, then, the issues surrounding the motivation underlying Lincoln’s recorded conduct have been carefully glossed over by those who view Lambert Simnel as a spurious claimant to the throne. Indeed, those historians who accepted the Tudor accounts of Lambert Simnel had little other option, because if Simnel was an impostor, Lincoln’s actions were a complete mystery, utterly lacking any credible explanation.

Despite this problem, most historians have nevertheless maintained that Lambert Simnel claimed – falsely – to be Edward, Earl of Warwick, another (and younger) nephew of Richard III and Edward IV, and the son of George, Duke of Clarence. It is intriguing, therefore, to discover that several surviving contemporary sources actually report that Simnel really was the Earl of Warwick. The geographical location of the writers appears to be highly significant in determining their attitude on this point. While official English (Tudor) sources maintained that Simnel was an impostor, Burgundian sources took the opposite view. Irish sources also held the opposite view until the Tudor victory at Stoke began the slow process of bringing Ireland back under English rule. Thus, consciously or unconsciously, by maintaining that Simnel was a fake, modern historians are following the official Tudor line.

Another intriguing point is the fact that the boy known as Lambert Simnel began advancing his claim in Ireland, with support from Flanders. These locations are significant, because the Earl of Warwick’s father, the Duke of Clarence, had been accused in 1477–78 of attempting to smuggle his son and heir to either Ireland or Flanders. Why was this accusation levelled against Clarence at some length and in considerable detail, despite the fact that an official conclusion was then reached that his attempt had failed? Could it possibly be that – despite the fact that the government of his brother, Edward IV, proclaimed publicly that the 3-year-old Earl of Warwick was still at home – the Duke of Clarence actually succeeded in having his son sent out of England? As for the reason for the official government statement, it may have been that Edward IV and his advisors genuinely believed what they said.

As we have seen, the name ‘Lambert Simnel’ is supplied to us by official mouthpieces of Henry VII – who, of course, had every incentive for attempting to discredit the 1487 claimant. It is those same mouthpieces who also provide us with the alternative story of the pretender’s childhood – as the son, not of a king or a royal duke, but of a tradesman of some kind (there are various conflicting accounts of the father’s employment), who may have lived in Oxford. This story – as told, for example, by Polydore Vergil – superficially sounds clear and authoritative. In reality, however, when examined carefully, just like the other possible accounts of the boy’s childhood, the ‘Simnel of Oxford’ version appears to contain some puzzling elements and a number of contradictions.

Thus, in every respect, the story of Lambert Simnel is far from straightforward. In this re-examination of the pretender and his claims, I shall try to offer a thorough exploration of every piece of evidence – including some new or little-known material – and I shall attempt to avoid proposing any facile conclusions. To avoid prejudging any of the issues, henceforward I shall generally refer to the individual at the centre of the investigation, neither as ‘Lambert Simnel’, nor as the Earl of Warwick or the Duke of York, but as ‘the Dublin King’.

My re-examination begins with the conflicting versions of the Dublin King’s five possible childhoods. The first of these versions is the childhood of the younger son of Edward IV, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York and Norfolk. Many people may feel that they know the basic outline of Richard’s story well. As we shall see, however, the widespread use of the collective term ‘princes in the Tower’ in itself proves very clearly that the life history of Richard of Shrewsbury is quite widely misunderstood. As for the later stages of Richard’s real story, they are full of question marks.

Exploring Richard’s life necessarily involves a re-examination of whether or not the sons of Edward IV really were murdered. This leads inevitably to the theory advanced by some modern writers that perhaps the Dublin King was in reality none other than King Edward V. Although no fifteenth-century accounts explicitly proposed such a theory, this second possible childhood also has to be explored.

The third and fourth stories are two alternative versions of the life history of Edward of Clarence, Earl of Warwick, the son of the Duke of Clarence. The Earl of Warwick’s story has been very little studied and is generally not well understood. Even the entry under his name in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) contains at least one glaring inaccuracy.

A quick glance at the timeline at the end of this book reveals how young Warwick was when some of the key events took place in which he was allegedly involved. This suggests one very important point which seems generally to have been overlooked. How many people would easily have been able to recognise and identify him? In 1487 Warwick would have been 12 years old. In 1476–77, when his father had tried to smuggle him out of England (and had perhaps succeeded), the little boy had been only 2. How easy is it, even today, to recognise a boy of 12 whom one last saw when he was 2? When considered in this light, Henry VII’s parading through the streets of London of the young person whom he held in custody under the name of the Earl of Warwick, in an attempt to undermine the claims of the Dublin King, appears ridiculous and meaningless.

In fact, what will emerge, as we shall see, is that the life history of the Earl of Warwick actually has two potential – and quite different – versions. The first of these is the authorised version, as publicised by successive English governments. The second is an alternative, unauthorised and unfamiliar version; nevertheless, evidence for its possible authenticity does exist.

The fifth childhood story to be considered is that of the mysterious boy who seems to have borne the name Lambert Simnel – though one contemporary account by a rather important witness tells us that the boy’s real Christian name was actually John. This boy may have been brought up in Oxford, by his father, who may have been an organ maker – or a baker – or some other kind of tradesman. Possibly the boy was not brought up in Oxford, but was taken there by a clergyman who had evil intentions in respect of King Henry VII. Reportedly taken from his menial background (wherever that was) around the end of 1485, at the age of about 8, because he looked so much like the 10-year-old Earl of Warwick (whom most people had probably never seen) – or possibly because he resembled the even older Duke of York – Simnel was then allegedly trained to impersonate a royal prince by an insignificant – but obviously very enterprising – young Oxford priest. One account tells us that this priest was called William Symonds. However, another version of the story reports his name as Richard Simons. According to one source, Symonds/Simons was a prisoner of the Tudor government by the beginning of 1486. Confusingly, other sources report that he was only captured by Henry VII’s forces about fourteen months later, after the Battle of Stoke. It will probably already be apparent that, despite its widespread acceptance, in actuality this official Tudor account of events contains at least as many confusions and potential contradictions as the other versions of the pretender’s story.

Identifying for certain which of these four – or possibly five – boys was where, when and with whom, is by no means easy. The trail becomes increasingly complex as the story progresses. Nevertheless, a serious attempt to track down the true life histories and fates of all the boys in question is the only possible way of embarking upon the quest to shed new light on the story of Lambert Simnel and the Dublin King.

Note

In the Middle Ages the English calendar operated differently from the one we know today, in that the New Year began not on 1 January but on 25 March (Lady Day). Thus events which occurred in the months of January, February or March would have been counted by medieval English writers as occurring in the last months of the previous year. Some foreign writers, however, would have dated them in the modern manner. To avoid any possibility of confusion over year dates, all events which occurred in January, February or March are dated here in the following way:

February 1486/87

This means that in terms of the English medieval reckoning, the event in question took place in February, the penultimate month of 1486 – though in terms of the modern calendar we would date this as February, the second month of 1487.

The Historical Background

The background to the story of the Dublin King is the episode of English history popularly known as the Wars of the Roses. It is essential to understand the basic outline of this complex struggle for power within the royal family in order to be able to comprehend what took place in 1486–87.

The story of the Wars of the Roses started almost a century before the coronation of the Dublin King. It began in about 1390, with controversy over who was the true heir to the throne of the childless reigning monarch of the day, King Richard II. The rival contestants were, first, the descendants of Richard II’s senior uncle, Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence and, second, the family of a younger uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. As a result of the marriage of Anne Mortimer, great-granddaughter of Lionel, to her cousin, Richard, Earl of Cambridge, the Clarence descendants eventually evolved into what is known as the royal house of York, while John of Gaunt’s descendants were the house of Lancaster.

Who was the true heir of Richard II?

Historical attempts at analysing the rights and wrongs of the rival Mortimer/Yorkist and Lancastrian/Tudor claims to the throne are often based on the rather naïve assumption that the basic modern rules governing succession to the English throne also applied in the medieval period. The fact that the modern rules have only recently been altered should warn us against making any such assumption.

An examination of practice in relation to succession issues during the five centuries from 1000 to 1500 shows that the seizure of power by force, followed by subsequent Parliamentary ratification, was not infrequently the basis of a sovereign’s authority during this period. It accounts for the accessions of William I (the Conqueror), King Stephen, King John, Henry IV, Edward IV and Henry VII. The accessions both of Stephen and of Henry II also prove beyond any shadow of doubt that a royal daughter could transmit rights to the throne if there was a lack of royal sons. At the same time, however, the civil war between King Stephen and Henry II’s mother, Stephen’s cousin Matilda, demonstrates that prior to 1500 the right of daughters to succeed to the throne in person remained unclear.

In 1399 John of Gaunt’s son forcibly resolved the succession issue of his day by deposing, imprisoning and probably ultimately murdering King Richard II, and by seizing the crown for himself, under the royal title of King Henry IV. Thus began the reign of the house of Lancaster, which lasted for sixty-two years.

Of course, such behaviour invites retaliation. Its effect in this instance was that, from the very beginning of the Lancanstrian era, there were attempts to change the situation in favour of Richard II’s alternative heirs, the descendants of Lionel, Duke of Clarence. The early attempts were unsuccessful, of course, and the house of Lancaster remained on the throne throughout the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V. However, the position of the dynasty was weakened by the death of Henry V, followed by the succession of the third Lancastrian king, his baby son, King Henry VI.

Henry VI was a weak king even when he grew up. His position was further undermined by a tendency to mental instability, which he may have inherited from his grandfather, King Charles VI of France. Doubts about the legitimacy of his supposed son and heir also helped to undermine the Lancastrian cause. Thus, after various vicissitudes, which later came to be called the Wars of the Roses, the Yorkist attempts to displace the house of Lancaster were finally successful. First, Parliament decided that the Yorkist line must succeed to the throne after Henry VI. Then in 1461, after this decision had been contested unsuccessfully by a Lancastrian army, Henry VI was deposed by one of his Yorkist cousins, who founded the Yorkist dynasty and became King Edward IV. Edward IV’s claim to the throne was a strong one, based on three very solid arguments: first, his superior blood right (via his female-line descent from Edward III’s second surviving son); second, his very effective seizure of power; third, the subsequent ratification of his succession by Parliament.

Ultimately, the death of Henry VI in the Tower of London left the Lancastrian dynasty with no clear heir, and the Yorkist takeover would almost certainly have proved to be a long-term success if Edward IV had had a sensible marriage policy. Unfortunately, by involving himself in two secret weddings, the king laid himself open to the accusation of bigamy. In 1461 he married Eleanor Talbot, daughter of the late first Earl of Shrewsbury,1 but in 1464, while Eleanor was still alive, he also secretly married Elizabeth Woodville. Unfortunately for Edward, since only the second of these two secret marriages produced offspring, those children then became liable to accusations of illegitimacy. Matters came to a head when Edward IV died unexpectedly in April 1483.

Notionally Edward IV’s heir was his eldest son, Edward, Prince of Wales, the elder of the so-called ‘princes in the Tower’. Following his father’s death, in April 1483, this Prince of Wales was initially proclaimed king as Edward V. However, the subsequent revelation of Edward IV’s bigamy provoked a new controversy between those members of the nobility, such as Lord Hastings, who were prepared to hush up the young king’s technical illegitimacy, and those like the Duke of Buckingham, who believed that it should not be hushed up, and who insisted that the order of succession should be altered, either to maintain the principle of absolute legitimacy upon which the Yorkist claim to the throne had always been based, or perhaps to ensure the exclusion from any position of power of the parvenu and upstart Woodville family.

The immediate outcome of Hastings’ opposition was his execution. Then, on the basis of the evidence of Edward IV’s bigamy (and the consequential illegitimacy of his children by Elizabeth Woodville), coupled with the fact that George, Duke of Clarence had been attainted and executed in 1478, thereby excluding his children from the succession, the throne was offered to Edward IV’s only surviving brother, the Duke of Gloucester, who thus became King Richard III. Since a Parliament had not, at that stage, formally been opened, the offer of the crown to Richard III was made initially by the Three Estates of the Realm – those noblemen, bishops and abbots, and representatives of the commons, who were in London waiting for the opening of Parliament. However, the following year, when a full Parliament was sitting, the offer was formally encapsulated in legislation, citing both the evidence of bigamy, and also the offer made to Richard III the previous summer.

As at every stage since the usurpation of Henry IV in 1399, the new change in the order of succession to the throne was not universally accepted. In France there was a remote descendant of John of Gaunt living in exile. The French, always happy to undermine the existing government in England, supported this obscure claimant, and to their – and probably his own – surprise, in August 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth, he suddenly found himself King of England, with the royal title of Henry VII.

Henry rapidly repealed the parliamentary